Talkin’ Trash in Manchester---Part 4 of 4
by Alan Dyer and Ray Berg
In July 1879, the Council received complaints concerning the dangerous conditions that existed in the tannery area, the bank of the upper pond where a pig sty was located, and certain unnamed premises on Exchange Place. The following week the village attorney was asked to draft an ordinance relative to the problem. Of course, eight years previously a bylaw had been enacted that provided for defining and prosecuting these very nuisances, but enforcement had never been a priority. Two weeks later there had been no response to this request. By the spring of 1884, health officer Sheldon claimed that his efforts to improve the village’s health and sanitation were futile because he did not possess the power to demand changes. Evidently, either no new ordinance had been forthcoming, or there had been little enforcement of its provisions or the original bylaw. Dr. Sheldon’s statement is found in the same column in the Enterprise as one that claimed the village never looked better. Houses were being painted and receiving general maintenance, new fences were under construction, and yards were receiving the attention they needed. Expressions concerning the state of the village, both optimistic and pessimistic, are often found side by side in the Enterprise during this period.
Figure 11 – Exchange Place Looking East, circa 1890
Whatever the legal remedies in place may have been, sanitary conditions were not about to substantially improve in Manchester for a number of years. The spring of 1885 began with complaints of a dozen rotting rats in an alley that no one had seen fit to dispose of. Although people had begun to clean up their yards, the smell that emanated from burning the accumulated rubbish pervaded the village air. These realities resulted in yet another year of fear that cholera, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and other dreaded diseases might soon appear. Again, the Council moved that an ordinance concerning public health be enacted. Perhaps it was, perhaps it was not, but there was no change in the state of the sanitation within the village.
As the decade neared its end, the calls for the Council, the Board of Health, and the health officers to do something continued. A recommendation that a second health officer be appointed was made, as if this could make a difference without some effort at enforcement. This period also saw the introduction of a new plea, one that had civic pride and concern for others as its foundation. Keeping one’s premises clean should be done voluntarily and as an act of charity towards others. To complain about your neighbor’s yard was not the answer. Instead, each citizen’s concern should be for the state of his own property. Only in this way could a clean, healthy, and prideful community be created.
Did this plea work? Perhaps, but it is not possible to give a definitive answer. In June 1892 it was mentioned that the merchants were taking pride in keeping the front of their stores and the gutters clean. They, however, had neglected the rear of their properties and the adjoining alley, both of which contained large accumulations of assorted filth. It is also true that in the 1890s the deplorable state of sanitation in the village received less attention in the newspaper. On the opposite side of the equation were the complaints against the slaughter houses. For at least 20 years people had watched waste from these establishments float down the river. In 1893 the odor from the Knorpp and Mayer Slaughter House became so severe that the owners were forced to clean up the premises. The village, having determined that a poor job was done, fined them $10.05. Either a separate public health law had been enacted by this time, or the village fathers had finally decided to enforce the other laws on the books that had been ignored in the past.
Figure 12 – Municipal Garbage Heaps Were One Solution
Centralized garbage heaps were also a short-term solution, and in Manchester were located in current Kirk Park and adjacent to the railyard in current Chi-Bro Park.
The temporary middens that had been a concern for decades were not the only sanitation concern for village officials. There were also the urban cows. Certainly they added to the “dung hill” aspect of the problem, but of equal concern was the fact that owners turned their cows loose at night to graze about the village. Throughout the night they destroyed trees, trampled gardens, littered the sidewalks and streets, and endangered people who happened to suddenly find themselves in the way of Manchester’s night raiders. Not to mention the constant deposit of horse manure on the streets day and night.
Early Sanitation Designs and Unexpected Consequences
Sewers, often referred to as drains, were another aspect of the sanitation problem. They were laid in areas that had been swamp land at an earlier time, where rain water collected, and in places with a high water table that created “flowing wells” and flooded basements. These sewers could be found on Jefferson, Duncan, Washington, Water, and Boyne Streets, Exchange Place, at the foot of Railroad Street across Exchange Place, at the rear of the stores on Exchange Place, and on Maiden Lane. They were constructed from tile, with the residents who benefited either paying for the tile and the village performing the work at its expense, or the village assuming ⅓ of the cost and the residents the remaining ⅔. Individuals often tapped into these sewers at their own expense. Jacob Miller, Mat Blosser, Nat Schmid, John Wuerthner, and Casper Raby were among those who took advantage of this opportunity, as did the Goodyear House. The owners of the Arbeiter Block built a private sewer from their building to the river.
Of course these sewers created their own problems as they sought to solve others. They often became plugged and the water backed up into basements. When the river was especially high, the result was the same for the residents along the line. This was not exactly clean water as statements about the horrible smell that emanated from sewer openings attest to. When the Goodyear House connected to the street drain in 1895, water tanks were placed in the hotel rooms to supply water for washrooms and water closets. Although the function of running a pipe from a residence to the sewer was never fully explained, it is clear that the hotel’s purpose exceeded the desire to simply remove relatively clean water from a basement. As residential indoor plumbing became more common, it too must have made use of the sewers whose original purpose was to carry off excess rain water. .
What then was the ultimate destination of the waste water, animal remains, animal waste, and other rubbish that was generated by the village? Some was burned which resulted in a cloud of noxious smelling smoke that enveloped the town. The remainder eventually made its way to the village’s lowest point, the River Raisin. The contents of the Goodyear House’s water closets, the pig waste from the pen on the bank of the river, slaughter house refuse, and more eventually ended up here. This was the same place where the fishermen fished, the children swam during the warm summer months, and people often bathed. It was also the source for the ice used by every family and many businesses to keep their food fresh.
Figure 13 – Bathing in the River Raisin and Mill Ponds Often Brought an Unpleasant Surprise
In times of drought, or when the mill ponds were low due to water usage, the odors that pervaded the area became, at the least, “unpleasant” and, at the most, an “intolerable stench.” Not only did rotting vegetable matter become trapped at the dams, but polluted river banks and bottoms were exposed to bake in the summer’s sun. The only solution to ridding the village of this stench was to entreat the mill owners to make their dams and flumes water tight in an attempt to keep the ponds at their ordinary height.
These problems would eventually be solved, but change would not come rapidly. Manchester, as was true of the rest of the world, was on the cusp of a more modern age. Telephone service and electricity had reached the village in the 1880s and the automobile was only a few decades away. First the cows began to disappear—milk delivery began in 1895—then, with the advent of the automobile, the family horse was no longer a necessity. In time, the keeping of farm animals in the village would disappear completely. These measures helped, but there is anecdotal evidence that human waste was still being flushed into the river in the 1920s and 1930s. This situation probably continued to exist until the mid-1950s. In 1948 the village purchased the land for Manchester’s sewage treatment plant, old sewers or drains were identified and plugged, the plant was constructed, and homes and businesses were hooked to the new system which went online in April 1956. It would be upgraded in July 1989.
These actions, however, did not put a complete end to the village’s waste reaching the river. Don Limpert, a former owner of the Manchester Mill, found tomato plants flourishing at the river’s edge near an open pipe in either 1981 or 1982. A dye test by the village traced the pipe’s origin to the Union Savings Bank. It had been run to the river in 1894 when that building was constructed. In spite of earlier efforts to cap the old sewers and drains before the treatment plant began operation, several additional active lines were also discovered during this decade. It was not until 1989 that officials were satisfied that the village’s waste was no longer polluting the River Raisin.
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